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What is nicer after a long day than sinking your feet into comfortable slippers? But one Italian designer is hoping to show that shoes made from mushrooms can be just as cosy.

A pair of light brown slippers, bowls, lampshades and even a chair are also among the everyday objects that artist Maurizio Montalti has been fashioning from various fungi, such as the "mushrooms that you find in the forest when you take a walk."

Montalti, 36, hopes one day his new, sustainable material could even replace plastic, made from diminishing fossil fuels and difficult to recycle.

"I started working with fungi as part of my design practice a few years ago," he told AFP, saying he was seeking a "different vision" on the benefits of humans engaging "with species, which are usually disregarded, such as fungal organisms."

His prime material is mycelium, the white, organic and underground part of a mushroom composed of a network of tiny threads. At first invisible to the human eye, the network can become so dense that it grows into a visible, furry mass.

"Mycelium is a very interesting product because it is able to break down all leaves for instance, or all kinds of products that we don't use anymore," said Ilja Dekker, technician at the world's only microbe museum, Micropia, in Amsterdam.

This means it can be used to make different products.

"It can be used to build all types of things like vases, things that we can put inside our houses. But also to build our houses, as a building material to actually make a house," she said.

Micropia, an interactive museum housed next to Artis, Amsterdam's zoo, is hosting a small permanent exhibition of Montalti's work as part of its mission to highlight how useful microbes are.

Cooking fungi

His concept of "growing design" allows objects to grow naturally with no external shaping, cutting or sculpting, much as plants do in the wild.

Placed into moulds made from wood, clay, plastic or plaster, the mushroom is left to gorge on organic matter like wood chips, straw, hay or linen.

"They feed on such plant matter and while degrading it, they also extend their microscopic filamentous threads and they create this very interconnected network of threads which works as a binding glue, you could say as a natural glue," said Montalti.